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Topic: The NEW Game Journal

You wouldn't have needed to grind in BoF2 if the status attack spells didn't have a hard-coded 100% fail chance on boss, and if half of the buffs didn't not work because of idk pointer errors.

5 is easily my favorite of the lot and has basically nothing to do with any of the other games in the series, besides the setting.

4's mostly bogged down by stupid, mandatory mini-games* and some odd slow-going bits. Mechnically, the battle system seems to actually work pretty well. The dungeons don't really rely on character personal skills as much, although now that I think about this it really doesn't change much since in BoF2 they never really amounted to anything more than really basic lock-and-key type things. It has kind of a slow start I guess.

BoF 1 made RPGs pretty interactive since a lot of the active party members had unique abilities. So I gave them a big hand there. The music was pretty damn good too (every so often that "save theme" gets in my head). I dreamed of living in a city made of gold too.. =(

BoF 2 was damn hard. Slow battles, beautiful animation, but this and 1 had that thing in common where bosses would get a second wind or some shit with like 500 HP that you had to crack atagain. The flying town was slow as fuck, but I liked that this started the good/bad ending, and I loved the setting (a town with a dead-ish dragon guarding what's pretty much the gates of hell). I thought this game had a lot of class, and the story got surprisingly dark (who else wanted to shed a tear over Rand's mum?). I'd love if they remade this, there's a lot of potential.

BoF 3. The gene system and the masters were great... but it felt a lot like there was a "right" way to play, missing out on the masters made the game really difficult. Mikba, the boss you fight shortly after getting Rei back, was probably harder than the final boss. I loved the animations, enemies and characters looked brilliant -- but I hated how older Nina looked like a fucking twit. Young Ryu had some sort of stupid thing bouncing on his head. Anyways... music was really hit or miss. I loved the happy tracks, the sad ones just weren't with it.

I love BoF 4. I thought the music was almost perfect as well. The story was great, characters, art, etc. Fucking battles were so slow and the interface was awkward. Anyways, I liked it. Lots of pointless mini-games here too. I don't know why they liked them so much, I'd take puzzles over mini-games.

BoF 5 rocks, the odd ball worked.

But fuck... what's the point, without a 6, Capcom's moved on. Be nice if they at least continued the series on the 3DS or something.

Yeah, that drove me nuts. The battles, I mean. It wasn't so much that the /gameplay/ was slow but just like... animations too longer than they should've, and the framerate seemed... off, and there was like, input lag in the menus.

Not as bad as Wizardry 8 though and again I need to remind myself to finish my mod that removes most of the animation frames from the attack animations in that game.

Logged

o/` I do not feel joy o/`o/` I do not dream o/`o/` I only stare at the door and smoke o/`

I haven't played Skyrim in a while, so I decided to boot it up. I guess there was a new update since then so I installed it. Checked online to see what it did. Apparently it was a bunch of bug/crash fixes and it added mounted combat. Cool. I leave the building where I last saved, jump into some water and start swimming. Game freezes. Fuck you, Bethesda! I don't know why I still have this game. I got my fix when I played it for a couple weeks straight.

Ugh, I have so many great games in my backlog, but almost all of my systems are currently in storage(along with most of my games) ten states away. x_x Cannot wait till I can get things out of storage.

Till then I am stuck playing Leged of Heroes III as my last game with me that I have not beaten. I think this is my current record holder for the longest time between buying a game and actually playing it. Five and a half years. I really can't say that I am regretting not playing this game because I'm not interested in the story and the battle system is fairly bland. Oh well I guess it is marginally more interesting than replaying a game I have already beaten.

I remembered Breath of Fire 3 rocking.... I knew I loved it.... but these memories were all crafted and stocked up in me nah-gun upon the titles release many moons ago... But wow... I had no idea NO RECALL of just how much this rocked... talk about classic-gaming-greatness... between this and the .hack series right now I don't even care to check siliconera daily ATM-LoL

Weird, I recall finding Breath of Fire 3 to be my least liked of the four "proper" Breath of Fire games. It has been a while since I played it, so I don't really recall why I disliked it. So I'm curious, what exactly is it that you enjoy about the game?

Even though everyone else already more then satisfied a reply to this, I feel it would be rude of me not to acknowledge the question anyhow.....

I love BOF3 for a number of reasons that were already expressed... and, actually for a number of reasons that it is disliked it seems.... For one the cast and art style are my favorite amongst the franchise. I love Teepo... I've been itching for a new tattoo and its a toss up right now between something from the BOF franchise or the Madoka Magica anime series and if I go the BOF avnenue Teepo is totally in the running...

Moving on, the dungeon designs, mini games and difficulty all gel well enough to keep me never really feeling as though things are getting longwinded. I almost always feel at points in games that things become "routine" and/or patterned in such a way where I'm just going through the motions of predictable gameplay to see more narrative. I just don't feel that way here. Somehow they keep the experience feeling and looking nice and "fresh" for me.... This is also one of the few soundtracks I would call "charming" as well..... not incredible... but completely appropriate for the mood of the visual and narrative..... As you can tell thus far presentation means A LOT to me in games... and it is just all right on the money here for me.

I love the Master system as well... I can't believe this hasn't been ripped off more by other titles... So many play-mechanics get re-done and tweaked over and over again... and not that the master system is the most original in the world, but it is far easier to digest and more rewarding, IMO, than some of the micro-management of grids and numbers in more current gen RPGs.

And I gotta give credit to BOF3 for being unique in a very un-original sense.... now here me out before you write this off as non-sense. It evolved RPG's beyond the days of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo by, IMO, evolving what had been working and what fans loved about the predecessors... In other words, you had titles like FF7 (I'm not saying FF7 was bad BTW....) taking RPG's into somewhat uncharted territories in an effort to mainstream and commercialize things as much as humanely possible and move things in new and exciting directions... Then you had games like BOF3, which to me, stand as examples more of what became of the evolved 16-bit days, staying true to form as much as possible whilst making the transition to new hardware.... Despite some other stellar titles that did this (wild arms, suikoden, et cetera....) we clearly see today who won the battle in the long run..... JRPG's are not what they used to be and BOF3 marks one of the finest and final games of those major 16 bit franchises to stay true to form. It didn't do anything flashy but it sure satisfied the BOF itch for fans such as myself.

So ultimately my reasons for loving this are really very subjective... that is, I am not gonna sit and argue that this game does anything "better" than any others... because in all honesty it doesn't.... but it does the BOF series, and fans, complete justice.

And just to touch upon something else.... I totally loved the fact that Blue was a hidden character in BOF2. In fact, I love a great deal about breath of fire 2.... However, on the note of blue, she was not only a really freakin' cool throwback to the first title but, if I recall, she made the last leg of that game much easier.

I'm with Klyde as far as BOF3 goes. I love that game, and it holds a special place in my heart. I mean, just look at my avatar(actually, that's from IV. I thought it was from III). I haven't changed it in years. It was one of the first RPGs, besides FFVII, that I remember eagerly waiting for to come out. It kept getting pushed back. I would call my local game store frequently to ask what the release date was. I even cut out the previews and reviews from Gamefan magazine and taped them to my wall in anticipation. I still own the same copy my mom bought me. The case is all cracked and worn showing that my time was well spent. I didn't care much for the earlier BOF games, but I hold BOFIV and V in the same high regard as BOF3.

The only BoF games I've played are 2 and 3, and I thought both were really good. BoF 4 is a major missing piece of my PS1 RPG collection and I'm debating whether I should buy it on PSN or not.

The one thing I didn't like about BoF 2 and BoF 3 (other than its difficulty and bad dungeon slogs) were their weird, esoteric methods for getting a few of the secrets. I don't remember exactly, but for the Earth Shaman in BoF 2 aren't you supposed to clear out a field of enemies without using magic and donating 20 times to a church or something? And in BoF 3 I think I probably only got about 60% of the available Masters and battle formations by the midgame, even though I was pretty diligent in exploring. For the record, I beat BoF2 via emulator several years ago, and haven't beaten BoF3 but I have a 20+ hour savefile on one of my memory cards.

And as for Bleu in BoF 2, the best part about her wasn't her magic (which is pretty good), but the fact that she's great without using any Shamans. Just about every other character needs a specific Shaman combination to reach their full potential, and Bleu welcomely frees up Shaman slots. Without using Bleu, the only obvious setup that lets you use transformed versions of three characters is Rand+Katt+Nina; that's a really good team, but maybe not the team everyone wants....

EDIT: heh, reading this made me research some old BoF stuff, and I found this picture of BoF 2's six Shamans:

I think Jean was *only* good with a Shaman. I never played him, having to do his stupid fucking quest in that palace was enough and took at *least* five hours to complete with that horrid harpsichord song. Spar and I never bothered figuring out which was best. As you say, Bleu was best without even needing it. I remember her always in my party. Rand too. Otherwise Katt and Nina sort of fit in. The later characters just weren't too hot (Bo included). I hate when a game can distinctively demonstrate that it has some characters better than others. I was playing Radiant Historia the other day and I noticed that every character was really strong in some way. BoFIII was alright for this as well (apparently Peco is the shit if you take the time to use him.. unfortunately him sucking donkey nut for so long really disheartens me to try).

BoF2 was also kind of dumb in that some of the characters WOULD be useful early on and then get useless later. I remember Bo being REALLY good during the early parts of the game when you have him, but getting really useless later on.

From what I remember, all of the characters in BoF4 were useful, and given how the battle system worked, you could just kind of switch people around as needed, on the fly, or let them use their back-row effect.

I also can't tell if ZXA is actually hard or if I'm just bad at videogames. It actually feels closer to the original MM games to me in terms of how much damage you take from idk getting shot. Getting shot wasn't too big of a deal in most of the X games.

Logged

o/` I do not feel joy o/`o/` I do not dream o/`o/` I only stare at the door and smoke o/`

I was playing Radiant Historia the other day and I noticed that every character was really strong in some way. BoFIII was alright for this as well (apparently Peco is the shit if you take the time to use him.. unfortunately him sucking donkey nut for so long really disheartens me to try).

Yeah, I think BoF3 did a pretty good job of this if you used the masters decently. I've said this before, but I buffed up Nina with defense seeds then let he train with the Magic master

Emitai for the rest of the game. Her HP sucked, but the buffed up defense and the crazy high INT stat more than made up for it. She hit really hard. I think Peco was similar in that if you trained him with good masters, he was awesome. I think why he can be amazing is because you get him further into the game when you already have access to some masters and he begins at level 1 thus allowing him to take full advantage of masters from the get-go.

I got up super early this morning and couldn't go back to sleep (~4am) so I did a few chapters of FE6. Beat Zephiel and unlocked the new chapters (which I didn't do the first time I played). Settled into a top 10 of Roy (SWORD OF SEALS), Lance, Dieck, Thany, Lugh, Lilina, Shin, Fir, Gonzo, and Miledy. Early MVPs were Lance and Dieck, more recently it's probably been Miledy, who is both a very good offensive flier AND my only trained character with Def above 20. She's great.

I beat Dust last night. I ended up with about a 74% completion, which isn't too bad for me. 19 hours. I thought about going after all the extra stuff, but just decided to finish it. I really liked it a lot. Beautiful game to look at and listen to. The combat was crazy fun, even with it being repetitive. The story was a bit cliche, but did manage to throw me for a loop or two. It was even quite poignant at times. As for what's next...I was thinking about downloading Corpse Party because it sounds fun. I also might finally play a bit of Xenoblade.I thought I might try out an Assassins Creed(2, of course) game, or even Dragon Age 2. I'm not really sure.